Calmiden pressed closer. “We couldn’t walk in the dusk, ever any more, Julie, among the mango trees, with the fire-flies all about us, or sit on the wharf and watch the little boats.”

Julie’s gaze dropped again in heavy thought. Calmiden was looking at her closely.

“What lovely hair you have! Oh! do be kind to yourself, and to all the rest of us.”

She lifted her head. “Why, anyway, should it make any difference in the long run what I do about it?” she demanded of the universe.

“Then you won’t go?” Calmiden exclaimed joyously.

Still Julie hesitated. But the instincts of youth and the joy of living had won the struggle in her breast.

“No,” she agreed.

When Julie went to the mess that evening, she found the Major scowling heavily at the table cloth. He announced at last: “I’ve just received an order from the Department which revokes commissary privileges for civilians. This will of course deprive them of the privilege of Army messes. I seldom make any comment upon my orders, but right now this appears to be particularly unfortunate. We are a remote and inaccessible unit of society, facing the roughest conditions; and now some of us are about to be completely cut loose. Supplies will have to be procured in Solano, from Shylocks who exact excessive prices. They must be requisitioned at once, but until they arrive, I shall, on my own responsibility, keep this mess open.”

He looked at Julie as he spoke. From the first, he had made her his special charge. The girl was aghast. For the purchase of large supplies she had no money, having despatched it all to her creditor across the ocean. She left the room heavily, and groped her way down the road. There were no fire-flies to light the world to-night.

Suddenly some one stepped out from among the trees and softly spoke her name. He made a quick sign for silence, and she suppressed the incredulous cry that had sprung to her lips.

It was Adams, dropped down from the skies; for how else, with Dao on the other side of the island, could he have gotten here?

“My hour came, and I bolted!” he said. “I’ve ridden without sleep two days through a wilderness. The ogre wouldn’t let me have a leave; but I persuaded him to give me a three-day hunting pass to go after deer in the mountains. Don’t know how I ever got through; and if the Major should find it out—or any of them—I’d be court-martialled and chucked. There seems to be a path in this grove, which we can follow to get out of the way of observation. I came, of course, to talk to you.”

The path ran not far from the Old Maid’s house, into the copse. It brought them upon the deserted end of an estate, where a small house could be seen deeply sheltered in the trees.

“That’s a nice place—sort of a wild garden.”

They settled themselves upon a log. The moon coming out from behind clouds broke only fitfully into these woodland depths. All around them was the soft still dusk, and a mysterious pensiveness in the night.

“I had to come,” Adams declared. “I wanted to see human beings, I wanted to talk to you. There’s an appetite of the spirit that has to be satisfied. I haven’t had any dinner, nor what you might call any lunch, but I don’t care. I’ve run amuck to get here. I couldn’t stand living with the lower man any longer. Doc’s gone, and there were just the ogre and myself!” He rested his elbows on his knees, and dropped his head heavily in his hands. “The men are sick and going down. The falling white man drops till there is nothing white about him but his skin! I won’t be that. I won’t go down with the rest! Oh, I’ve a right to live!

“I fled over the mountains, I would have gone through blood for this instant’s reunion with the decencies of my kind. To-night with my hat pulled over my eyes, I walked into the post when it was getting dark. I left my horse outside the village, and as I passed every house, I looked into it like a ghost. What a jolly little group! The Major was in his window, his iron old face turned to the hills, planning, I’ll bet, red-hot campaigns that would put his honor at rest. Good, decent old fellow, dressed in his stiff white. You ought to see how we go to dinner in Dao—or rather, you shouldn’t.

“There was old Bent, sewing on a button by the light of a lamp, and Dwight, a few feet away, reading a paper in a hammock, with Mike sitting on his head. Calmiden was out on the back gallery, with his feet wound round his tilted chair, staring at the sunset or the island, or something over there.

“Three of the fellows all together. I used to make the fourth. We used to play cards, and read our letters out loud.

“Little Mrs. Smith, farther on, was bending over a photograph in the dusk—that one of Marlborough taken in Cuba, I suppose. It made me wish I’d had a romance.

“You are about the only girl I ever thought about. But think how long it will be before I see you again! And then there are all these men here—”

Time passed unnoticed by the two sitting on the log amid the silvery lights and shadows, reviewing the experiences of youth and confiding to each other its ideals. Those hours were printed forever on Julie’s memory. Long afterwards she could recall Adams as he had sat with the moonlight playing about the shadow of his figure and his pondering gaze bent upon the encroaching darkness, and the way he had said, throwing out his arms, “Every time I stretch out my hand—it seems to come up against an invisible wall!”

“Who’s that?” he exclaimed suddenly.

A man in white was coming out of the house. He opened the gate in front of them.

Julie hesitated. She had identified the secret residence.

“It is the house of Nemecia Victoria,” she replied.

“The village ThaÏs! That was an American. No native is so tall.”

He rose soberly. “I must go back and sit on the lid of my little hell. I’m all right now. I went wild, and have done a mad thing, but it has set me right.”

They strolled along close to the fence that cut the woods off from the public road. They stopped at the dilapidated gate. He took her hands in his. “Dear, little, unforgettable friend of a few hours! We have both to stick to our outposts now, but these times can’t last forever. Till better days then, and don’t let me pass out of your thoughts! Good-by!” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

Then he struck off at once into the darkness of the thicket. Julie watched motionlessly at the gate till the shadowy form disappeared. She had been groping around in darkness for a hand, and suddenly, out of another’s extremity, one had come to meet her own. Adams and she had both deeply become involved in a great struggle. They had both, the girl subconsciously felt, been elected to the destiny of the East. Between them there was a cemented bond. By himself “holding out,” he had helped her across the ditch.

A sound close at hand caused her to look around quickly. The figure of a man in white was turning down a side street, not a few yards away. Julie recognized it as the same figure that she and Adams had seen emerge from Nemecia Victoria’s house.